It's not all abundance: Detectability and accessibility of food also explain breeding investment in long-lived marine animals.

ABSTRACT: Large-scale climatic indices are extensively used as predictors of ecological processes, but the mechanisms and the spatio-temporal scales at which climatic indices influence these processes are often speculative. Here, we use long-term data to evaluate how a measure of individual breeding investment (the egg volume) of three long-lived and long-distance-migrating seabirds is influenced by i) a large-scale climatic index (the North Atlantic Oscillation) and ii) local-scale variables (food abundance, foraging conditions, and competition). Winter values of the North Atlantic Oscillation did not correlate with local-scale variables measured in spring, but surprisingly, both had a high predictive power of the temporal variability of the egg volume in the three study species, even though they h

SUBMITTER: Real E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9491606 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature